Espaço Web de Alberto Simões

PT Dicionário Aberto: Um novo recurso para PLN

• Author: Alberto Simões and Rita Farinha
• Journal: Vice-Versa
• Year: 2011
• Editor: Alberto Lugrís
• Number: 16
• Pages: 159–171
• Month: December

PFTL: A Systematic Approach For Describing Filesystem Tree Processors

• Author: Nuno Carvalho, Alberto Simões, José João Almeida, Pedro Rangel Henriques and Maria João Varanda Pereira
• Booktitle: INForum'11 — Simpósio de Informática (CoRTA2011 track)
• Editor: Raul Barbosa and Luis Caires
• Publisher: Dep. de Eng. Informática da Universidade de Coimbra
• Pages: 222–233
• Isbn: 978-989-96001-5-7
• Address: Coimbra, Portugal
• Year: 2011
• Month: Setembro
• Language: EN
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Today, most developers prefer to store information in databases. But plain filesystems were used for years, and are still used, to store information, commonly in files of heterogeneous formats that are organized in directory trees. This approach is a very flexible and natural way to create hierarchical organized structures of documents. We can devise a formal notation to describe a filesystem tree structure, similar to a grammar, assuming that filenames can be considered terminal symbols, and directory names non-terminal symbols. This specification would allow to derive correct language sentences (combination of terminal symbols) and to associate semantic actions, that can produce arbitrary side effects, to each valid sentence, just as we do in common parser generation tools. These specifications can be used to systematically process files in directory trees, and the final result depends on the semantic actions associated with each production rule. In this paper we revamped an old idea of using a domain specific language to implement these specifications similar to context free grammars. And introduce some examples of applications that can be built using this approach.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Weaving OML in a General Purpose Programming Language

• Author: Nuno Carvalho, José João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: INForum'11 — Simpósio de Informática (CoRTA2011 track)
• Editor: Raul Barbosa and Luis Caires
• Publisher: Dep. de Eng. Informática da Universidade de Coimbra
• Isbn: 978-989-96001-5-7
• Address: Coimbra, Portugal
• Year: 2011
• Month: Setembro
• Language: EN
• Pages: 184–197
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Most existing programming languages can be categorized as general purpose programming languages, meaning that they can be used to implement solutions for any given domain. They are not, in any way, optimized for a specific set of problems. In contrast, Domain Specific Languages (DSL) are used to solve specific problems in a well defined domain. DSL are optimized to a particular set of problems, but they lack support for a wide range of operations that are required when dealing with real world problems. So, in a perfect world, we would like to implement applications using a general purpose programming language, but use a set of different DSL to handle specific domains' tasks. In this paper we describe a DSL named Ontology Manipulation Language (OML), designed to describe operations over with ontologies. Programs can be written using only the OML syntax and be executed independently. OML syntax was designed to deal with ontologies and the language itself is optimized to perform these tasks, which means that other relatively simpler tasks can not be easily done. To overcome this challenge a mechanism was developed so that you can weave small snippets of OML code inside Perl programs, meaning we have the power of OML to manipulate ontologies and, at the same time, all the paraphernalia of modules that Perl offers to handle everything else.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Parser Generation in Perl: Crafting an AnTLR Back-end

• Author: Hugo Areias, Alberto Simões, Pedro Henriques and Daniela da Cruz
• Booktitle: INForum'11 — Simpósio de Informática (CoRTA2011 track)
• Editor: Raul Barbosa and Luis Caires
• Publisher: Dep. de Eng. Informática da Universidade de Coimbra
• Isbn: 978-989-96001-5-7
• Address: Coimbra, Portugal
• Year: 2011
• Month: Setembro
• Language: EN
• Pages: 258–269
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Completely convinced of the benefits of Perl for the implementation of language processors and after doing a deep review of the state of the art on parser generation in Perl, we have identified a clear need for a powerful tool that accepts attribute grammars and builds compilers in Perl. The ob jective of this paper is to present a solution based on the developing of a back-end for ANTLR to generate attribute based language processors in Perl, to overcome the lack of this kind tools described in the preliminary study referred above. To achieve the intended ob jective, the parser generator tool ANTLR was studied in detail to understand its components and to plan the best strategies to perform the necessary retargeting of its back-end. In this process, the Java compilers generated by ANTLR were analysed carefully to learn the algorithms adopted and the language resources employed. After that, the general scheme for Perl compiler was sketched. This task has required a comparative study of object-oriented extensions to the standard Perl in order to decide how to provide the basic features available in Java. We also discuss in the paper the performance tests carried out to prove that the generated processors, produced by our new tool, are effcient and provide indeed a reliable and competitive solution.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Ensinador: corpus-based Portuguese grammar exercises

• Author: Alberto Simões and Diana Santos
• Journal: Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural
• Year: 2011
• Pages: 303–311
• Volume: 47
• Month: Setembro
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  In this paper we describe Ensinador, a tool that creates grammar exercises for teaching Portuguese as a foreign language, at university level, based on large annotated corpora. After discussing the motivation for the tool, and the context in which it was deployed, we present its specification and its implementation, discussing the particular requirements with concrete examples. We report actual use of the tool in teaching, and compare it to other systems in the literature, ending the paper with a short description of future and ongoing related work.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN xml2pm: A Tool for Automatic Creation of Object Definitions Based on XML Instances

• Author: Nuno Carvalho, Alberto Simões and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: XATA 2011 — 9ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Year: 2011
• Pages: 103–114
• Isbn: 978-989-96863-1-1
• Editor: Alberto Simões
• Month: 1–2 June
• Address: Vila do Conde, Portugal
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  The eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) is probably one of the most popular markup languages available today. It is very typical to find all kind of services or programs representing data in this format. This situation is even more common in web development environments or Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), where data flows from one service to another, being consumed and produced by an heterogeneous set of applications, which sole requirement is to understand XML. This workflow of data represented in XML implies some tasks that applications have to perform if they are required to consume or produce information: the task of parsing an XML document, giving specific semantics to the information parsed, and the task of producing an XML document. Our main goal is to create object definitions that can analyze an XML document and automatically create an object definition that can be used abstractly by the application. These objects are able to parse the XML document and gather all the data required to mimic all the information present in the document. This paper introduces xml2pm, a simple tool that can inspect the structure of an XML document and create an object definition (a Perl module) that stores the same information present in the orinial document, but as a runtime object. We also introduce a simple case of how this approach allows the creation of applications based on Web Services in an elegant and simple way.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN XML Schemas for Parallel Corpora

• Author: Alberto Simões and Sara Fernandes
• Booktitle: XATA 2011 — 9ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Year: 2011
• Pages: 59–69
• Isbn: 978-989-96863-1-1
• Editor: Alberto Simões
• Month: 1–2 June
• Address: Vila do Conde, Portugal
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Parallel corpora are resources used in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. They are defined as a set of texts, in different languages, that are translations of each other. Note that these translations do not need to cover the full document, as we might have sentences translated just on some of the languages. When dealing with the process of sharing resources, recent years have bet on the use of XML formats. This is no different when talking about parallel corpora sharing. When visiting different projects in the web that release parallel corpora for download, we can find at least three different formats. In fact, this abundance of formats has led some projects to adopt all the three formats. This article discusses these three main formats: XML Corpus Encoding Standard, Translation Memory Exchange format and the Text Encoding Initiative. We will compare their formal definition and their XML schema.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN OML: A Scripting Approach for Manipulating Ontologies

• Author: Nuno Carvalho, Alberto Simões and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: CISTI'11 - 6ª Conferência Ibérica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informação
• Year: 2011
• Pages: 624–629
• Month: June
• Address: Chaves, Portugal
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  There are different definitions for ontologies. Different knowledge areas tend to define ontologies in a different way. For computer science, an ontology can be used to describe, in a well defined and structured way, knowledge about a specific domain. These artifacts store rich information that can be reasoned about, this information can also be target of many structured processing functions. There is a diversity of programs that can be implemented to take advantage of these features and produce applications in every area of knowledge. The Ontology Manipulation Language (OML) is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) designed to describe and execute operations that reason about ontologies. These reasoning operations can be used to manipulate and maintain the current information in the ontology, infer new knowledge or concepts, or even produce any kind of side effect. OML is a simple and descriptive language, yet it is powerful enough to implement complex operations or reasoning engines in a clear and efficient way. To actually run programs written in OML a stand alone compiler is available, as well as a mechanism for embedding OML programs in a generic programming language. This allows the quick development of applications that make use of ontologies, by describing ontology related operations in wove OML snippets throughout the code. This mechanism has proven to be a very effective and clear approach for taking advantage of adopting ontologies to represent information, while maintaining the implicit advantages of using a general-goal programming language.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Introducing the Per-Fide Project: Parallelizing Portuguese with six different Languages (Español, Russian, Français, Italiano, Deutsch, English)

• Author: Sílvia Araújo, Ana Correia, Ana Oliveira and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: The International Symposium on Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies
• Year: 2010
• Editor: Richard Xiao
• Address: Edge Hill University, Ormskirk
• Month: July
• Downloads: [pdf] 

P-PAL: Uma base lexical com índices psicolinguísticos do Português Europeu

• Author: Ana Paula Soares, Montserrat Comesaña, Álvaro Iriarte Sanroman, José João Almeida, Alberto Manuel Brandão Simões, Ana Costa, Patrícia Cunha França and João Machado
• Journal: Linguamática
• Year: 2010
• Volume: 2
• Number: 3
• Pages: 67–72
• Month: December
• Issn: 1647–0818
• Editor: Alberto Simões and José João Almeida and Xavier Gómez Guinovart
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Neste trabalho apresentamos o projecto Procura-PALavras (P-PAL) cujo principal objectivo é desenvolver uma ferramenta electrónica que disponibilize informação sobre índices psicolinguísticos objectivos e subjectivos de palavras do Português Europeu (PE). O P-PAL será disponibilizado gratuitamente à comunidade científica num formato amigável a partir de um sítio na Internet a construir para o efeito. Ao utilizar o P-PAL, o investigador poderá fazer uma utilização personalizada do programa ao seleccionar, da ampla variedade de análises oferecidas, os índices que se adequam aos propósitos da sua investigação e numa dupla funcionalidade de utilização: pedir ao programa para analisar listas de palavras previamente constituídas nos índices considerados relevantes para a investigação ou para obter listas de palavras que obedeçam aos parâmetros definidos. O P-PAL assume-se assim como uma ferramenta fundamental à promoção e internacionalização da investigação em Portugal.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Automating psycholinguistic statistics computation: Procura-Palavras

• Author: João Filipe Machado, José João Almeida, Alberto Simões and Ana Soares
• Year: 2010
• Booktitle: FALA2010 – II Iberian SLTech Workshop
• Editor: Carmen Mateo and Francisco Díaz and Francisco Pazó
• Address: Vigo
• Pages: 217–220
• Month: November
• Isbn: 978-84-8158-510-0
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  This article describes psycholinguistic lexical databases available in various languages, including English, Spanish and Portuguese. These lexical databases are important for researchers in Psycholinguistics and other related areas, providing a pool of experimental materials and allowing for an efficient process of selection of these experimental materials. The process of gathering statistics is slow, resulting in a small pool of materials in the short-term. The need to find an alternative method to gather limited or yet unavailable statistics for a specific language led us to consider gathering statistics from other languages and to compute their triangulation. Our aim was to automatize the computation of statistics such as Familiarity, Imageability, Age of Acquisition and Written Word Frequency for that specific language. We will describe the process of preparing this data and triangulating and comparing statistics for some languages in an attempt of finding a relationship between them. The results were analysed considering correlations between each statistic in each pair of languages and by computing the mean of absolute differences between each language’s values.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Translation Dictionaries Triangulation

• Author: Alberto Simões and Xavier Gómez Guinovart
• Year: 2010
• Booktitle: FALA2010 – II Iberian SLTech Workshop
• Editor: Carmen Mateo and Francisco Díaz and Francisco Pazó
• Address: Vigo
• Isbn: 978-84-8158-510-0
• Pages: 171–174
• Month: November
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Probabilistic Translation Dictionaries (PTD) are translation resources that can be obtained automatically from parallel corpora. Although this process is simple, it requires the existence of a parallel corpora for the involved languages. Minoritized languages have a limited amount of available resources. For example, while they can have a few parallel corpora, the number of parallel language-pairs uses to be restricted. We defend that if a minoritized language A has a parallel corpus with a language B, and language B has a parallel corpus with another language C, then we can obtain a helpful probabilistic translation dictionary between A and C. In this document we will formalize the probabilistic translation dictionaries triangulation, perform some experiments making the triangulation between Galician, English and Italian, and conclude with an evaluation of the proposed approach.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Testing as a Certification Approach

• Author: Alberto Simões, Nuno Carvalho and José João Almeida
• Journal: Electronic Communications of the EASST
• Volume: 33
• Year: 2010
• Editor: Luis Barbosa and Antonio Cerone and Siraj Shaikh (Guest Eds.)
• Note: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification
• Issn: 1863-2122
• Language: EN
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  For years, one of the main reasons to buy commercial software instead of adopting open-source applications was the, supposed, guarantee of quality. Unfortunately that was rarely true and, fortunately, open-source projects soon adopted some good practices in their code development that lead to better tested software and therefore higher quality products. In this article we provide a guided tour of some of the best practices that have been implemented in the Perl community in the recent years, as the pathway to a better community-oriented repository of modules, with automatic distributed testing in different platforms and architectures, and with automatic quality measures calculation.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Parser Generation in Perl: an Overview and Available Tools

• Author: Hugo Areias, Alberto Simões, Pedro Henriques and Daniela da Cruz
• Booktitle: INForum'10 — Simpósio de Informática (CoRTA2010 track)
• Editor: Luis S. Barbosa and Miguel P. Correia
• Publisher: Universidade do Minho
• Address: Braga, Portugal
• Pages: 209–212
• Year: 2010
• Month: Setembro
• Language: EN
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  There are some modules on Comprehensive Perl Archive Network to help with the parser generation process in Perl. Unfortunately, some are limited, only supporting a particular parser algorithm and do not covering some developer needs. In this document we will analyse some of these modules, testing them in terms of performance and usability, allowing a proper evaluation of the results and careful considerations about the state of art of parser generation using Perl.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Apresentação do projecto Per-Fide: Paralelizando o Português com seis outras línguas

• Author: Sílvia Araújo, José João Almeida, Alberto Simões and Idalete Dias
• Journal: Linguamática
• Year: 2010
• Volume: 2
• Number: 2
• Pages: 71–74
• Month: Junho
• Issn: 1647–0818
• Editor: Alberto Simões and José João Almeida and Xavier Gómez Guinovart
• Language: PT
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Neste documento apresentamos o projecto Per-Fide que tem como principal objectivo a criação de recursos bilingues entre a língua portuguesa e seis outras línguas: espanhol, russo, francês, italiano, alemão e inglês. Este processo iniciar-se-á com a compilação de corpora paralelos em diferentes áreas, nomeadamente a literatura, religião e política (legislativa e jurídica) e técnico-científica. Os corpora serão alinhados à frase e à palavra e serão objecto de extracção automática de dicionários e terminologia bilingues. O documento irá focar inicialmente os principais objectivos do projecto, seguindo-se uma visão geral sobre as tarefas propostas e os resultados que se esperam obter.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Test::XML::Generator — Generating XML for Unit Testing

• Author: Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: XATA 2010 — 8ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Pages: 39–44
• Year: 2010
• Editor: Alberto Simões and Daniela da Cruz and José Carlos Ramalho
• Address: Vila do Conde
• Month: Maio
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  To define a DTD or a Schema is not a trivial task. It can be compared to the task of preparing a data structure or, in some cases, to program that data structure adding some semantic. This makes this task error prone. It is common that a final Schema/DTD supports some special XML structures that should not be considered correct, or that, although these special structures are correct, they are not being correctly managed by the application parsing them. We defend that the possibility to automatically generate XML documents based on a Schema/DTD can help preventing these situations. The generated documents can be used for unit testing and help tuning the Schema/DTD or fixing application problems. They can also assist on benchmarking issues as sometimes developers does not have access to full featured real world documents. In this article we discuss a Perl module (Test::XML::Generator) that provides different mechanisms for automatically generate XML documents based on a DTD and a set of controlling parameters.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Processing XML: a rewriting system approach

• Author: Alberto Simões and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: XATA 2010 — 8ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Pages: 27–38
• Year: 2010
• Editor: Alberto Simões and Daniela da Cruz and José Carlos Ramalho
• Address: Vila do Conde
• Month: Maio
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Nowadays XML processing is performed using one of two approaches: using the SAX (Simple API for XML) or using the DOM (Document Ob ject Model). While these two approaches are adequate for most cases there are situations where other approaches can make the solution easier to write, read and, therefore, to maintain. This document presents a rewriting approach for XML documents processing, focusing the tasks of transforming XML documents (into other XML formats or other textual documents) and the task of rewriting other textual formats into XML dialects. These approaches were validated with some case studies, ranging from an XML authoring tool to a dictionary publishing mechanism.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Automatic Parallel Corpora and Bilingual Terminology extraction from Parallel WebSites

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: 3rd Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora
• Pages: 50–55
• Year: 2010
• Editor: Reinhard Rapp and Pierre Zweigenbaum and Serge Sharoff
• Address: Valletta, Malta
• Month: May
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  In our days, the notion, the importance and the significance of parallel corpora is so big that needs no special introduction. Unfortunately, public available parallel corpora is somewhat limited in range. There are big corpora about politics or legislation, about medicine and other specific areas, but we miss corpora for other different areas. Currently there is a huge investment on using the Web as a corpus. This article uncovers GWB, a tool that aims automatic construction of parallel corpora from the web. We defend that it is possible to build high quality terminological corpora in an automatic fashion, just by specifying a sensible Internet domain and using an appropriate set of seed keywords. GWB is a web-spider that works in conjunction with a set of other Open-Source tools, defining a pipeline that includes the documents retrieval from the web, alignment at sentence level and its quality analysis, bilingual dictionaries and terminology extraction and construction of off-line dictionaries.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Bigorna – a toolkit for orthography migration challenges

• Author: José João Almeida, André Santos and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2010)
• Year: 2010
• Address: Valletta, Malta
• Month: may
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Languages are born, evolve and, eventually, die. During this evolution their spelling rules (and sometimes the syntactic and semantic ones) change, putting old documents out of use. In Portugal, a pair of political agreements with Brazil forced relevant changes on the way the Portuguese language is written. In this article we will detail these two Orthographic Agreements (one in the thirties and the other more recently, in the nineties), and the challenges present on the automatic migration of old documents spelling to their actual one. We will reveal Bigorna, a toolkit for the classification of language variants, their comparison and the conversion of texts in different language versions. These tools will be explained together with examples of migration issues. As Birgorna relies on a set of conversion rules we will also discuss how to infer conversion rules from a set of documents (texts with different ages). The document concludes with a brief evaluation on the conversion and classification tool results and their relevance in the current Portuguese language scenario.

• Isbn: 2-9517408-6-7
• Date: 19-21
• Pages: 227–232
• Editor: Nicoletta Calzolari et al.
• Publisher: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Processing and Extracting Data from Dicionário Aberto

• Author: Alberto Simões, José João Almeida and Rita Farinha
• Booktitle: Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2010)
• Editor: Nicoletta Calzolari et al.
• Year: 2010
• Publisher: European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
• Address: Valletta, Malta
• Pages: 2600–2605
• Date: 19–21
• Isbn: 2-9517408-6-7
• Month: may
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Synonyms dictionaries are useful resources for natural language processing. Unfortunately their availability in digital format is limited, as publishing companies do not release their dictionaries in open digital formats. Dicionário-Aberto is an open and free digital synonyms dictionary for the Portuguese language. It is under public domain which makes it usable for any task. Synonyms dictionaries are commonly used for the extraction of relations between words, constructing structures similar to WordNet, or just the extraction of lists of words of specific type. This article presents Dicionário-Aberto, discusses its characteristics and the type of information present on it. Then, we describe an API to help on processing Dicionário-Aberto without the need to tackle with the dictionary format. Finally, we analyze the results on some data extraction experiments.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Parallel corpus-based bilingual terminology extraction

• Year: 2009
• Author: Xavier Gomez Guinovart and Alberto Simões
• Editor: Marie-Claude L’Homme and Sylvie Szulman
• Booktitle: 8th International Conference on Terminology and Artificial Intelligence
• Address: Toulouse, France
• Month: November, 18–20
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  This paper presents a parallel corpora-based bilingual terminology extraction method based on the occurrence of bilingual morphosyntactic patterns in probabilistic translation dictionaries. We discuss an experiment focused on two language pairs – English-Galician and English-Portuguese, and show results which experimentally confirm the high degree of accuracy of the proposed extraction technique.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Terminology extraction from English-Portuguese and English-Galician parallel corpora based on probabilistic translation dictionaries and bilingual syntactic patterns

• Author: Xavier Gomez Guinovart and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: I Iberian SLTech 2009
• Editor: António Teixeira and Miguel Sales Dias and Daniela Braga
• Year: 2009
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  This paper presents a research on parallel corpora-based bilingual terminology extraction based on the occurrence of bilingual morphosyntactic patterns in the probabilistic translation dictionaries generated by NATools. To evaluate this method, we carried out an experiment in which both the level of lexical cohesion of the term candidates and their specificity with respect to a non-terminological corpus of the target language were taken into account. The evaluation results show a high degree of accuracy of the terminology extraction based on probabilistic translation dictionaries complemented by bilingual syntactic patterns.

• Address: Porto Salvo, Portugal
• Month: September, 3–4
• Isbn: 978-989-96278-1-9
• Pages: 13–16
• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Bilingual Example Segmentation based on Markers Hypothesis

• Author: Alberto Simões and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: I Iberian SLTech 2009
• Editor: António Teixeira and Miguel Sales Dias and Daniela Braga
• Year: 2009
• Address: Porto Salvo, Portugal
• Month: September, 3–4
• Isbn: 978-989-96278-1-9
• Pages: 95–98
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  The Marker Hypothesis was first defined by Thomas Green in 1979. It is a psycho-linguistic hypothesis defining that there is a set of words in every language that marks boundaries of phrases in a sentence. While it remains a hypothesis because nobody has proved it, tests have shows that results are comparable to basic shallow parsers with higher efficiency. The chunking algorithm based on the Marker Hypothesis is simple, fast and almost language independent. It depends on a list of closed-class words, that are already available for most languages. This makes it suitable for bilingual chunking (there is not the requirement for separate language shallow parsers). This paper discusses the use of the Marker Hypothesis combined with Probabilistic Translation Dictionaries for example-based machine translation resources extraction from parallel corpora.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Webpaper — Más Perguntas e Boas Respostas: a Arte de Interrogar

• Author: Alberto Simões, Paulo Rocha and Rúben Fonseca
• Booktitle: O digital e o currículo
• Year: 2009
• Editor: Paulo Dias and António José Osório and Altina Ramos
• Pages: 227–238
• Publisher: Centro de Competência da Universidade do Minho
• Isbn: 978-972-98456-4-2
• Month: Maio

A Textual Rewriting system for NLP

• Author: J. J. Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: Applications of Portuguese Speech and Language Technologies, PROPOR 2008 Special Session
• Year: 2008
• Pages: 35–42
• Editor: António Teixeira and Daniela Braga
• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Bilingual Terminology Extraction based on Translation Patterns

• Author: Alberto Simões and José João Almeida
• Journal: Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural
• Year: 2008
• Month: September
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Parallel corpora are rich sources of translation resources. This document presents a methodology for the extraction of bilingual nominals (terminology candidates) from parallel corpora, using translation patterns. The patterns proposed in this work specify the order changes that occur during translation and that are intrinsic to the involved languages syntaxes. These patterns are described in a domain specific language named PDL (Pattern Description Language), and are extremely efficient for the detection of nominal phrases.

• Volume: 41
• Pages: 281–288
• Downloads: [pdf] 

Extracção de Recursos de Tradução com base em Dicionários Probabilísticos de Tradução

• Author: Alberto Manuel Brandão Simões
• School: Escola de Engenharia, Universidade do Minho
• Year: 2008
• Address: Braga
• Month: 19 May
• Downloads: [pdf] 

Portuguese-English word alignment: some experiments

• Author: Diana Santos and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: LREC 2008 — The 6th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
• Year: 2008
• Month: 28–30, May
• Address: Marrakech
• Publisher: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  In this paper we describe some studies of Portuguese-English word alignment, focusing on (i) measuring the importance of the coupling between dictionaries and corpus; (ii) assessing the relevance of using syntactic information (POS and lemma) or just word forms, and (iii) taking into account the direction of translation. We first provide some motivation for the studies, as well as insist in separating type from token alignment. We then briefly describe the resources employed: the EuroParl and COMPARA corpora, and the alignment tools, NATools, introducing some measures to evaluate the two kinds of dictionaries obtained. We then present the results of several experiments, comparing sizes, overlap, translation fertility and alignment density of the several bilingual resources built. We also describe preliminary data as far as quality of the resulting dictionaries or alignment results is concerned.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

CGI::Auto — Automatic Web-Service Creation

• Author: Davide Sousa, Alberto Simões and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: XATA 2008 — 6ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Year: 2008
• Month: February
• Pages: 22–27
• Isbn: 978-972-99166-5-6
• Editor: José Carlos Ramalho and João Correia Lopes and Salvador Abreu
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  The creation of a CGI or a WebService as an interface for a command line tool is not as unusual as it may seem. It is extremely usual and useful. There are applications developed as command line tools that can be useful for different purposes, and different kind of users. Some of these users might not be able to run these tools directly. For instance, it is not easy to install a bunch of Perl modules to have a small tool working. For these situations, it is easier to make the tool available in the Web or as a WebService. The problem with making the tool available in these fashions, is that programmers tend to rewrite the tools to incorporate the CGI or XML specific layers. We defend that these CGI or WebService interfaces should use the already available command line tool, without any change. This interface should be able to read a simple textual specification of how the command line tool works, and buid the CGI or XML specific layers automatically. The CGI::Auto module aims this purpose: to encapsulate command line tools in a CGI layer based on a textual specification, transforming the command line tool in a web application.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

NAVEGANTE — An Intrusive Browsing Framework

• Author: Nuno Carvalho, José João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: XATA 2008 — 6ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Year: 2008
• Month: February
• Pages: 52–63
• Isbn: 978-972-99166-5-6
• Editor: José Carlos Ramalho and João Correia Lopes and Salvador Abreu
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  NAVEGANTE is a generic framework to build superior order proxies for intrusive browsing. This framework provides the means for developing tools that behave as proxies, but perform some processing task on the content that is being browsed. Parallel to this content processing, applications can also run other user-defined functions with different purposes and interfaces, but we'll explain those later. Currently, NAVEGANTE only builds applications that run as CGIs, but this is intended to change in a near future. Applications are built writing programs in NAVEGANTE's Domain Specific Language (DSL). NAVEGANTE is a work in progress. This article aims to describe the current state of development. What applications can be built and how. Also, we identify some implementation problems, and briefly discuss some future improvements. Finally, we try to illustrate most of the concepts described using a couple of case studies.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

PT Segmentação Bilingue com base na Marker Hypothesis

• Author: Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: Simpósio Doutoral em Inteligência Artificial 2007
• Pages: 135–144
• Year: 2007
• Editor: César Analide and Paulo Novais and Pedro Henriques
• Address: Guimarães
• Month: December
• Isbn13: 978-989-95618-1-6
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  A existência de exemplos de tradução é imprescindível para tradução assistida por computador bem como para tradução automática baseada em dados (EBMT e SMT). No entanto, o uso de unidades de tradução de corpora paralelos directamente na tradução não é eficaz já que estas unidades são demasiado grandes, e portanto, torna-se pouco provável que uma mesma unidade de tradução tenha de ser traduzida mais do que uma vez. Para colmatar este problema há necessidade de explorar outras metodologias para a divisão de unidades de tradução em segmentos paralelos mais pequenos. Uma das abordagens que tem vindo a ser utilizada é a segmentação baseada em marcadores (Marker Hypothesis). Este documento pretende documentar as experiências realizadas na utilização deste método para a segmentação de texto português (paralelo com o inglês).

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN An Ontology-Based Approach To Systems Biology Literature Retrieval and Processing

• Booktitle: New Trends in Artificial Intelligence
• Editor: José Neves and Manuel Filipe Santos and José Manuel Machado
• Pages: 541–552
• Isbn13: 978-989-95618-0-9
• Author: Anália Lourenço, Alberto Simões, José Almeida, Miguel Rocha, Isabel Rocha and Eugénio Ferreira
• Year: 2007
• Month: December
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  This paper details the SysBio Explorer, a Systems Biology Literature Retrieval and Processing Framework, whose aim relies on the automatic inference of regulatory and metabolic networks based on biomedical literature. The SysBio Explorer does not focus on any organism or problem in particular and encompasses a number of processing and analysis techniques. It works over full-text documents, applying Natural Language Processing techniques and using biomedical dictionaries and ontologies together with hand-made rules. Besides biological entity recognition and relation extraction, document classification, relevance assessment and authoring networks are also within its present scope. The framework is described in terms of its design requirements and implementation decisions, exposing current achievements, but also highlighting present obstacles and future work. Experiments over real-world problems concerning the organisms E. coli, S. cerevisiae and H. pylori are used in its validation.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Using Text Mining Techniques for Classical Music Scores Analysis

• Booktitle: New Trends in Artificial Intelligence
• Editor: José Neves and Manuel Filipe Santos and José Manuel Machado
• Pages: 791–799
• Author: Alberto Simões, Anália Lourenço and José João Almeida
• Year: 2007
• Month: December
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Abstract.Music Classification is a particular area of Computational Musicology that provides valuable insights about the evolving of compo- sition patterns and assists in catalogue generation. The proposed work detaches from former works by classifying music based on music score in- formation. Text Mining techniques support music score processing while Classification techniques are used in the construction of decision mod- els. Although research is still at its earliest beginnings, the work already provides valuable contributes to symbolic music representation process- ing and subsequent analysis. Score processing involved the counting of ascending and descending chromatic intervals, note duration and meta- information tagging. Analysis involved feature selection and the evalu- ation of several data mining algorithms, ensuring extensibility towards larger repositories or more complex problems. Experiments report the analysis of composition epochs on a subset of the Mutopia pro ject open archive of classical LilyPond-annotated music scores.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Parallel Corpora based Translation Resources Extraction

• Author: Alberto Simões and José João Almeida
• Journal: Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural
• Year: 2007
• Pages: 265–272
• Number: 39
• Month: September
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  This paper describes NATools, a toolkit to process, analyze and extract translation resources from Parallel Corpora. It includes tools like a sentence-aligner, a probabilistic translation dictionaries extractor, word-aligner, a corpus server, a set of tools to query corpora and dictionaries, as well as a set of tools to extract bilingual resources.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Makefile::Parallel Dependency Specification Language

• Author: Alberto Simões, Rúben Fonseca and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: Euro-Par 2007
• Year: 2007
• Address: Rennes, France
• Month: August
• Pages: 33–41
• Editor: Anne-Marie Kermarrec and Luc Bougé and Thierry Priol
• Volume: 4641
• Series: LNCS
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Some processes are not easy to be programmed from scratch for parallel machines (clusters), but can be easily split on simple steps. Makefile::Parallel is a tool which lets users to specify how processes depend on each other. The language syntax resembles the well known Makefile makefiles format, but instead of specifying files or targets dependencies, Makefile::Parallel specifies processes (or jobs) dependencies. The scheduler submits jobs to the cluster scheduler (in our case, Rocks PBS) waiting them to end. When each process finishes, dependencies are calculated and direct dependent jobs are submitted. Makefile::Parallel language includes features to specify parametric rules, used to split and join processes dependencies. Some tasks can be split into n smaller jobs working on different portions of files. At the end, another process can be used to join the results.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Jspellando nas morfolimpíadas: Sobre a participação do Jspell nas Morfolimpíadas

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: Avaliação conjunta: um novo paradigma no processamento computacional da língua portuguesa
• Year: 2007
• Pages: 83–90
• Editor: Diana Santos
• Isbn: 978-972-8469-60-8
• Publisher: IST Press

Avaliação de alinhadores

• Author: Alberto Simões and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: Avaliação conjunta: um novo paradigma no processamento computacional da língua portuguesa
• Isbn: 978-972-8469-60-8
• Publisher: IST Press
• Year: 2007
• Pages: 219–230
• Editor: Diana Santos

XML::TMX — Processamento de Memórias de Tradução de Grandes Dimensões

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: XATA 2007 — 5ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Year: 2007
• Month: February
• Pages: 83–93
• Isbn: 978-972-99166-4-9
• Editor: José Carlos Ramalho and João Correia Lopes and Luís Carríço
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  As ferramentas de tradução assistida por computador tentam reutilizar as traduções realizadas pelo tradutor sempre que uma frase semelhante tenha sido já traduzida. Para o intercâmbio destes documentos foi definido um formato denominado TMX (Translation Memory Exchange) baseado em XML. Este tipo de documento ganha facilmente tamanhos incomportáveis para o seu processamento com métodos tradicionais. Neste artigo propomos uma metodologia de ordem superior para o processamento de documentos de estrutura repetitiva (em que se inserem as memórias de tradução) com uma abordagem baseada na conjunção de SAX e DOM. São apresentados vários exemplos de filtros sobre memórias de tradução bem como um conjunto de medidas da sua eficiência.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

Alternativas ao XML: YAML e JSON

• Author: Rúben Fonseca and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: XATA 2007 — 5ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Year: 2007
• Month: February
• Pages: 33–46
• Isbn: 978-972-99166-4-9
• Editor: José Carlos Ramalho and João Correia Lopes and Luís Carríço
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  O XML tem sido eleito como a linguagem de anotação por excelência, possuindo ao mesmo tempo boas capacidades para serialização de estruturas computacionais e transporte de dados independente da plataforma. Recentemente porém, novos formatos de dados têm surgido. Alguns deles têm tido uma boa aceitação porque resolvem alguns problemas ou limitações do XML, sendo em algumas situações um bom complemento ou substituto do mesmo. Neste artigo iremos apresentar dois desses formatos de dados - o YAML e o JSON - fazendo uma abordagem geral dos mesmos e analisando algumas métricas que nos poderão ajudar a decidir se e quando usar estas alternativas.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN NatServer: A Client-Server Architecture for building Parallel Corpora applications

• Author: Alberto Simões and J. João Almeida
• Year: 2006
• Journal: Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural
• Address: Zaragoza, Spain
• Month: September
• Volume: 37
• Pages: 91–97
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Parallel corpora are important resources for most Natural Language processing tasks. From the common applications, like machine translation, to the usually mono-lingual tasks as paraphrase detection and word sense disambiguation, most researchers are using massive parallel corpora. Thus, the availability of an efficient way to manage them is very important. This paper presents a Client-Server architecture to query efficiently parallel corpora and probabilistic translation dictionaries.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Combinatory Examples Extraction for Machine Translation

• Author: Alberto Simões and J. João Almeida
• Year: 2006
• Booktitle: 11th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
• Editor: Jan Tore Lønning and Stephan Oepen
• Address: Oslo, Norway
• Pages: 27–32
• Month: 19–20, June
• Isbn: 82-7368-294-3
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  One of the bottlenecks of example-based machine translation (EBMT) is to be able to amass automatically quantities of good examples. In our work in EBMT, we are investigating how far one can go by performing example extraction from parallel corpora using Probabilistic Translation Dictionaries to obtain example segmentation points. In fact, the success of EBMT highly depends on examples quality and quantity, but also in their length. Thus, we give special importance on methods to extract different size examples from the same translation unit. With this article we show that it is possible to extract quantities for examples from parallel corpora just using probabilistic translation dictionaries extracted from the same corpora.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN T₂O — Recycling Thesauri into a Multilingual Ontology

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: Fifth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2006
• Year: 2006
• Address: Genova, Italy
• Month: May
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  In this article we present T₂O — a workbench to assist the process of translating heterogeneous resources into ontologies, to enrich and add multilingual information, to help programming with them, and to support ontology publishing. T₂O is an ontology algebra.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Publishing multilingual ontologies: a quick way of obtaining feedback

• Author: J. João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Year: 2006
• Booktitle: ElPub 2006 — Digital Spectrum: Integrating Technology and Culture
• Address: Bansko, Bulgaria
• Month: June
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Dictionary and Thesaurus are valuable resources for Natural Language Processing but do not exist as freely available as expected, especially for languages other than English and, when they exist, they are just available for querying online. Our main goal with T2O — Thesaurus to Ontology framework — is to create a multilingual ontology: freely available online and to download; with a computer readable format; with a good API; with a structure as rich as possible; reusing all the structured information we can get;

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Transcoding for Web Accessibility for the Blind: Semantics from Structure

• Author: António R. Fernandes, Alexandre Carvalho, J. João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: ElPub 2006 — Digital Spectrum: Integrating Technology and Culture
• Year: 2006
• Address: Bansko, Bulgaria
• Month: June
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  True accessibility requires minimizing the scanning time to find a particular piece of information. Sequentially reading web pages do not provide this type of accessibility, for instance before the user gets to the actual text content of the page it has to go through a lot of menus and headers. However if the user could navigate a web page based through semantically classified blocks then the user could jump faster to the actual content of the page, skipping all the menus and other parts of the page. We propose a transcoding engine that tackles accessibility at two distinct, yet complementary, levels: for specific known sites and general unknown sites. We present a tool for building customized scripts for known sites that turns this process in an extremely simple task, which can be performed by anyone, without any expertise. For general unknown sites, our approach relies on statistical analysis of the structural blocks that define a web page to infer a semantic for the block.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

PT Geração dinâmica de APIs Perl para criação de XML

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: XATA 2006 — 4ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Pages: 307–314
• Year: 2006
• Editor: José Carlos Ramalho and Alberto Simões and João Correia Lopes
• Address: Portalegre
• Month: February
• Isbn: 972-99166-2-4
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  É consensual que o XML como linguagem para a estruturação de documentos tem vindo a tomar um lugar relevante. É também evidente a vantagem obtida no uso de XML como linguagem de intercâmbio. No entanto, a sua sintaxe é demasiado descritiva pelo que a geração de documentos de forma manual é dolorosa sendo útil dispor de módulos que simplifiquem essa tarefa. Neste artigo propomos um módulo Perl (XML::Writer::Simple) configurável via DTD que simplifica a tarefa de gerar XML.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN The XLDB Group at the CLEF 2005 Ad-Hoc Task.

• Author: Nuno Cardoso, Leonardo Andrade, Alberto Simões and Mário J. Silva
• Booktitle: Accessing Multilingual Information Repositories, 6th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2005
• Year: 2005
• Pages: 54–60
• Address: Vienna, Austria
• Month: September
• Editor: C. Peters and F. Gey and J. Gonzalo and H. Mueller and G. Jones and M. Kluck and B. Magnini and M. Rijke
• Volume: 4022
• Series: LNCS
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  This paper presents the participation of the XLDB Group in the CLEF 2005 ad-hoc monolingual and bilingual subtasks for Portuguese. We participated with an improved and extended configuration of the tumba! search engine software. We detail the new features and evaluate their performance.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

PT Representação em XML da Floresta Sintáctica

• Author: Rui Vilela, Alberto Simões, Eckhard Bick and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: XATA 2005 — 3ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Pages: 351–361
• Year: 2005
• Editor: José Carlos Ramalho and Alberto Simões and João Correia Lopes
• Address: Braga
• Month: February
• Isbn: 972-99166-1-6
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  A Floresta Sintáctica é um recurso linguístico mantido e distribuído livremente ao público pela Linguateca. Face à necessidade de abranger uma maior comunidade de linguistas e de programadores na área do processamento da linguagem natural, procura-se distribuir este recurso em outros formatos alem do existente, tais como formatos baseados em XML. Pretende-se neste documento descrever o processo de equipar a Floresta Sintáctica com mecanismos que facilitem a sua utilização. Para isso pretende-se converter o seu formato actual para formatos baseados em XML. Serão analisados os problemas e questões da definição XML deste tipo de recurso. Apresenta-se ainda um módulo experimental construído especificamente para facilitar a construção de processadores da Floresta.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

PT Inferência de tipos em documentos XML

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Manuel Simões
• Booktitle: XATA 2005 — 3ª Conferência Nacional em XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Aplicadas
• Pages: 144–154
• Year: 2005
• Editor: José Carlos Ramalho and Alberto Simões and João Correia Lopes
• Address: Braga
• Month: February
• Isbn: 972-99166-1-6
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  A estrutura dos documentos XML é descrita, habitualmente, em DTDs e/ou Schemas, o que permite ao programador estudar a forma de processamento estrutural mais correcta para o tipo de documento em causa. No entanto, outros documentos há em que o tipo de documento não está definido e que obriga a analisar o documento para inferir a estrutura em causa. Paralelamente algumas especificações baseadas em Schemas tendem a ser de tal modo grandes que se tornam impossíveis de ler. Neste documento pretendemos apresentar a ferramenta PFS, capaz de inferir tipos a partir de documentos XML, de mostrar de forma compacta essa informação e pretendemos ainda mostrar como esses tipos podem ajudar no processamento desses documentos (usando XML::DT com tipos).

• Downloads: [pdf] 

PT A Importância do uso de Ontologias num Museu Virtual

• Author: Alberto Simões, Tiago Bezerra and Pedro Henriques
• Booktitle: II Congresso Internacional de Investigação e Desenvolvimento Sócio-cultural
• Year: 2004
• Address: Paredes de Coura
• Month: Outubro
• Organization: AGIR - Associação para a Investigação e Desenvolvimento Sócio-cultural
• Pages: sem pp
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Neste documento apresentamos a importância do uso de ontologias para a classificação das peças de um museu virtual, bem como para permitir ao utilizador uma visita contextualizada e coerente.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Linguateca: um centro de recursos distribuído para o processamento computacional da língua portuguesa

• Author: Diana Santos, Alberto Simões, Ana Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana Pinto, Anabela Barreiro, Belinda Maia, Cristina Mota, Débora Oliveira, Eckhard Bick, Elisabete Ranchhod, José João Dias de Almeida, Luís Cabral, Luís Costa, Luís Sarmento, Marcirio Chaves, Nuno Cardoso, Paulo Rocha, Rachel Aires, Rosário Silva, Rui Vilela and Susana Afonso
• Year: 2004
• Editor: Guillermo De Ita Luna and Olac Fuentes Chávez and Mauricio Osorio Galindo
• Booktitle: International workshop "Taller de Herramientas y Recursos Linguísticos para el Espanõl y el Portugués", IX Iberoamerican Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• Pages: 147–154
• Address: Puebla, México
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Neste artigo apresentamos uma panorâmica da actividade da Linguateca na criação e disponibilização de recursos e ferramentas para a língua portuguesa. Começamos por uma descrição dos objectivos e pressupostos da Linguateca e uma breve história da sua intervenção, e finalizamos com algumas considerações sobre a melhor forma de prosseguir na organização da área.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Distributed Translation Memories implementation using WebServices

• Author: Alberto Simões, Xavier Gómez Guinovart and José João Almeida
• Journal: Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural
• Pages: 89–94
• Volume: 33
• Month: July
• Year: 2004
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Translation Memories are very useful for translators but are difficult to share and reuse in a community of translators. This article presents the concept of Distributed Translation Memories, where all users can contribute and sharing translations. Implementation details using WebServices are shown, as well as an example of a distributed system between Portugal and Spain.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Parallel Corpora word alignment and applications

• Author: Alberto Manuel Brandão Simões
• School: Escola de Engenharia - Universidade do Minho
• Year: 2004
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Parallel corpora are valuable resources on natural language processing and, in special, on the translation area. They can be used not only by translators, but also analyzed and processed by computers to learn and extract information about the languages. In this document, we talk about some processes related with the parallel corpora life cycle. We will focus on the parallel corpora word alignment. The necessity for a robust word-aligner arived with the TerminUM project which goal is to gather parallel corpora from different sources, align, analyze and use them to create bilingual resources like terminology or translation memories for machine translation. The starting point was Twente-Aligner, an open-source word aligner developed by Djoerd Hiemstra. Its results were interesting but it worked only for small sized corpora. The work done began with the re-engineering of Twente-Aligner, followed by the analysis of the alignment results and the development of several tools based on the extracted probabilistic dictionaries.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

PT TX — Validação de XML baseada em tipos dinâmicos

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: XATA 2004 - XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas
• Pages: 217–224
• Year: 2004
• Isbn: 972-99166-0-8
• Editor: José Carlos Ramalho and Alberto Simões
• Month: February
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Desde o advento do SGML e posteriormente do XML, que a validação de documentos tem sido focada. Esta validação surgiu para analisar a estrutura dos documentos SGML e XML usando DTDs. Além dessa, e devido às restrições do XML em relação ao SGML, a validação de XML bem formado também tem sido usada. Mais recentemente, os Schema e Schematron vieram permitir a validação a um nível superior: não só a estrutura do documento mas também alguma validação de conteúdo. Neste artigo apresentamos a ferramenta TX que visa outro nível de validação, em que os tipos possam ser mais ricos e/ou calculados dinamicamente, e onde se possa definir funções de anotação e/ou correcção das porções do documento que não sigam as especificações.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

PT Memórias de Tradução Distribuídas

• Author: Alberto Simões, José João Almeida and Xavier Gomez Guinovart
• Booktitle: XATA 2004 — XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas
• Pages: 59–68
• Year: 2004
• Isbn: 972-99166-0-8
• Editor: José Carlos Ramalho and Alberto Simões
• Month: February
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Neste documento apresenta-se o conceito de memórias de tradução distribuídas, discutindo-se o seu interesse na área da tradução, bem como as vantagens que uma ferramenta de tradução pode tirar do seu uso. É apresentada uma possível implementação de memórias de tradução distribuídas usando WebServices numa arquitectura de cooperativismo. São definidos as mensagens (API) que um serviço deste género deve implementar para que uma ferramenta de tradução possa tirar partido da colaboração entre tradutores.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN Music publishing

• Author: Alberto Manuel Simões and J. João Almeida
• Year: 2003
• Isbn: 972-98921-2-1
• Publisher: Universidade do Minho
• Editor: Sely Costa et al.
• Booktitle: ElPub 2003 – International conference on electronic publishing
• Month: June
• Pages: 288–298
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Current music publishing in the Internet is mainly concerned with sound publishing. We claim that music publishing is not only to make sound available but also to define relations between a set of music objects like music scores, guitar chords, lyrics and their meta-data. We want an easy way to publish music in the Internet, to make high quality paper booklets and even to create Audio CD's. In this document we present a workbench for music publishing based on open formats, using open-source tools and script programming over them. The workbench is based on an archive specification written in a text-based format which includes sound references, music scores, chords and lyrics and their meta-information.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

PT Projecto TerminUM

• Author: J. João Almeida, Alberto Simões, José Castro, Bruno Martins and Paulo Silva
• Year: 2003
• Publisher: Universidade do Minho
• Booktitle: CP3A 2003 – Workshop em Corpora Paralelos, Aplicações e Algoritmos Associados
• Moth: June
• Pages: 7-14
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  O projecto TerminUM tem como objectivos principais o estudo, experimentação e a criação de recursos na área dos corpora paralelos, terminologia (descritiva) e recursos multilingues ligados a corpora: fazer extracção tão automática quanto possível de corpora a partir da web; fazer extracção de dicionários, de terminologia e de outros recursos ligados à tradução; criar e interligar as ferramentas desenvolvidas; criar e disponibilizar: (1) listas de Bitextos, corpora e corpora paralelos, (2) ferramentas de criação e transformação de corpora, (3) recursos multilingues derivados/ligados a corpora. Nesta apresentação serão abordadas algumas tarefas presentemente a decorrer no âmbito do projecto, nomeadamente: ciclo de vida da construção e transformação de corpora; resumo das ferramentas desenvolvidas (e em desenvolvimento); construção de corpora paralelos tomando como base legendas de filmes (subtitles), ficheiro de internacionalização (mensagens de software .po) e ficheiros de memórias de tradução (TMX); animação de corpora paralelos via web (criação de motores de consulta usando diversas ferramentas).

• Downloads: [pdf] 

PT Alinhamento de corpora paralelos

• Author: Alberto Simões
• Year: 2003
• Publisher: Universidade do Minho
• Booktitle: CP3A 2003 – Workshop em Corpora Paralelos: aplicações e algoritmos associados
• Address: Braga
• Month: June
• Pages: 71–77
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Este documento apresenta um conjunto de ferramentas denominado NATools para o alinhamento de corpora paralelos. É apresentado o processo de alinhamento tendo em conta os vários níveis intervenientes, desde o convencional alinhamento à frase, até ao alinhamento à palavra, com a criação dos respectivos dicionários de tradução. São apresentadas medidas em relação ao tempo usado para o alinhamento, bem como resultados obtidos. São discutidas técnicas para a detecção de traduções de termos multi-palavra usando o algoritmo de alinhamento à palavra. Os dicionários de tradução obtidos irão ser explicados e as suas aplicações exploradas: navegação e consulta web dos dicionários produzidos e corpora usado; alinhamento ao segmento de palavra (ou tradução "por exemplo"); classificação automática da qualidade de um par de traduções.

• Downloads: [pdf] 

EN NATools – A Statistical Word Aligner Workbench

• Author: Alberto M. Simões and J. João Almeida
• Journal: Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural
• Volume: 31
• Pages: 217–224
• Month: September
• Year: 2003
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  This document presents the TerminUM project and the work done in its statistical word aligner workbench (NATools). It shows a variety of alignment methods for parallel corpora and discusses the resulting terminological dictionaries and their use: evaluation of sentence translations; construction of a multi-level navigation system for linguistic studies or statistical translations.

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PT Engenharia reversa de HTML usando tecnologia XML

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Manuel Simões
• Booktitle: XATA — XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas
• Year: 2003
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  O proliferar de ferramentas criadores de HTML e o uso de HTML guiado pelo aspecto, tem vindo a arruinar o seu lado conceptual. Este problema foi reconhecido e deu origem a vários formatos ou tecnologias com o objectivo de separar o aspecto do conceito. No entanto a realidade actual mostra uma enorme quantidade de páginas HTML com péssima leitura conceptual e estrutural, invalidando uma série de usos possíveis da informação nelas contida. Nesta comunicação apresenta-se um trabalho (em fase inicial) que pretende fazer engenharia reversa de HTML para permitir aumentar a sua acessibilidade, a fim de ser usada num browser para invisuais.

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PT Histórias de Vida + Processamento Estrutural = Museu da Pessoa

• Author: Alberto Manuel Simões and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: XATA — XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas
• Year: 2003
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Este artigo apresenta a arquitectura actual do Museu da Pessoa, contemplando a forma como os documentos estão a ser editados, catalogados, arquivados, e processados para a criação das estruturas necessárias ao Museu.

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PT Extracção de corpora paralelo a partir da web: construção e disponibilização

• Author: José João Almeida, José Alves Castro and Alberto Manuel Simões
• Booktitle: Actas da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística
• Year: 2002
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Ao longo deste documento descrever-se-á um conjunto de ferramentas construídas para extracção automática de recursos bilingues a partir da Web, a partir de um site específico, a partir de um sistema de ficheiros contendo alguns textos que sejam traduções de outros, ou ainda a partir de memórias de tradução. Neste trabalho apresenta-se todo o processo de construção de corpora paralelo desde os algoritmos de minagem dos dados (data mining) até à construção de vários tipos de recursos bilingues incluindo a construção automática de corpus paralelos pesquisáveis na Internet.

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PT Geração de voz com sotaque

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Manuel Simões
• Booktitle: Actas da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística
• Year: 2002
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Como é sabido os sotaques podem estar ligados a uma zona geográfica, a um grupo social, podem até ser uma característica pessoal. O seu estudo e descrição tem interessado muitos investigadores embora normalmente esse estudo tem sido feito de modo pouco formal. No trabalho que aqui se relata, tentou-se descrever formalmente sotaques e disfunções através de criação de regras a integrar como variantes num gerador de voz. Deste modo, pretendeu-se criar um ambiente de experimentação dos modelos construídos para descrever algumas características de certos sotaques ou certas disfunções, de modo a permitir a sua validação. Constatou-se que se consegue obter certas disfunções e certos sotaques com facilidade por simples acrescento de regras opcionais em certas fases da geração da voz. Outros, aparentam ser de maior dificuldade, ou por não conhecermos suficiente bem os fenómenos neles envolvidos ou envolverem maior complexidade prosódica.

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EN Grabbing parallel corpora from the web

• Author: José João Almeida, Alberto Manuel Simões and José Alves Castro
• Journal: Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural
• Volume: 29
• Pages: 13–20
• Month: September
• Year: 2002
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Multilingual resources are useful for linguistic studies, translation, and many other tasks. Unfortunately, these resources are difficult to obtain and organize. In this document we describe a set of tools designed to help in the task of mining bilingual resources from the web, from a specific site, from a file system, from a list of URLs, or from a translation memory. As a design goal we intend to build tools that can be used both cooperatively (in pipeline) and also in a independent way.

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EN Library::* — a toolkit for digital libraries

• Author: Alberto Manuel Simões and José João Almeida
• Year: 2002
• Booktitle: ElPub 2002 - Technology Interactions
• Isbn: 3-89700-357-0
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  In last years the amount of digital documents has increased dramatically. Unfortunately the same did not occur with the structure and organization of the information. Traditionally we built a digital library using a catalog with documents' meta-information including a conceptual classification and an ontology of concepts. In this document we present a set of modules to help in the task of building and maintaining a digital library. It includes a module to work with ontologies, a set of modules to handle specific catalog formats (like BibTeX), a module to define new catalog formats and a tool to integrate ontologies and multi-format catalogs in a web browse-able knowledge-base.

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EN Silicon Virtual Machines

• Year: 2002
• Booktitle: Internal Conference on Computer Architecture
• Author: Alberto Manuel B. Simões
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  This communication looks into some virtual machine implementations, from the common stack-based architecture to the newest register-based one. It evaluates the feasibility of their implementation on silicon and how this approach can improve performance while maintaining language flexibility. Silicon virtual machines are not successful in the CPU market, mainly due to the inherent limitations of a virtual machine architecture: these are developed too centered on a language, making them very efficient for that language and very slow executing applications developed for other languages. This communication concludes with the statement that the best virtual machine we can make is a simple processor, similar to the ones we use nowadays.

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EN Directory Attribute Grammars

• Author: Alberto Manuel Simões, José João Almeida and Pedro Rangel Henriques
• Booktitle: VI Simpósio Brasileiro de Linguagens de Programação
• Isbn: 85-88442-20-5
• Pages: 297–308
• Year: 2002
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  To publish documents we must take care of documents' structure and their formal layout. If a large document is composed by a lot of parts including text, images, code and so on, they will lay in different files; so file organization should also be a concern in the mind of the publisher. Normally, we focus on the structure and design, and forget file organization until this becomes a trouble, at production stage. The most common way to organize files is using the file system; directory structure is very flexible but quickly becomes disorganized. In this paper we present a way to turn a file system tree into an organized web page, using a grammatical formalism (hereafter called Directory Attribute Grammars: DAG = AG + Makefiles). We developed a tool (similar to a compiler) to publish different formats on the web, automatically, from the file structure and a DAG specification. This tool allows us to maintain a huge number of documents of different types, and process them systematically.

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PT Cálculo de frequências para entradas de dicionários através do uso conjunto de analisadores morfológicos, taggers e corpora

• Author: Paulo Alexandre Rocha, Alberto Manuel Simões and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: Actas da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (APL2001)
• Year: 2002
• Pages: 407–418
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Apresentamos neste documento uma possível abordagem à extracção de frequências de palavras a partir de corpora, baseada numa utilização cooperativa de várias ferramentas de Processamento de Linguagem Natural.

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PT jspell.pm — um módulo de análise morfológica para uso em Processamento de Linguagem Natural

• Author: Alberto Manuel Simões and José João Almeida
• Booktitle: Actas da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (APL2001)
• Pages: 485–495
• Year: 2002
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Neste documento é nosso propósito apresentar as características presentes no analisador morfológico jspell e quais as suas consequências ao nível de aplicações de processamento de linguagem natural. Como ferramenta que é frequentemente integrada em software mais específico, apresentamos um módulo Perl desenvolvido com o objectivo de facilitar a interligação do analisador morfológico com pequenas aplicações desenvolvidas em linguagens de scripting. Devido à constante necessidade de melhoramento de dicionários, e em particular dos analisadores morfológicos, discutimos as propriedades que estes devem conter para facilitar o seu processamento e enriquecimento automático.

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EN Text to speech — "A rewriting system approach"

• Author: José João Almeida and Alberto Manuel Simões
• Journal: Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural
• Pages: 247–253
• Volume: 27
• Year: 2001
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  In this document we present an open source Portuguese text to speech. Our first goal is to provide a flexible way to extend it, using a generic way to convert Portuguese words on SAMPA phonemes, and consult dictionaries only on exceptions examples. The Text-to-Speech is compound of five layers, each one based on simple rules in a way to be easily tuned. In order to do that, we wrote a generic text rewriting system that is presented in the section two. The result of this work is a tool that can be used as an independent Text-to-Speech system or as a Natural Language Processing library for various tasks. We present some examples how them can be used in the Applications section.

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EN Alfarrábio: Adding value to an Heterogeneous Site Collection

• Author: José João Almeida, Pedro Rangel Henriques, Jorge Rocha and Alberto Simões
• Booktitle: Congresso Nacional de Bibliotecários e Arquivistas
• Address: Porto
• Month: May
• Year: 2001
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  The Web is probably the largest collection of digital resources ever built, and it maintains it's continuous growth. But this large collection is not a digital library, according to the most accepted sense, since it lacks some fundamental mechanisms. While it is possible to create and maintain a structured site, with powerful cataloging mechanisms and information retrieval, in a way that can be considered as a digital library, the task of grouping several heterogeneous sites with the same purpose is a more complicated problem, and several approaches can be taken. In this article, we report our effort to develop information extraction, cataloging and browsing mechanisms to a set of heterogeneous cultural sites, to be regarded, from the user's point of view, as a single digital library. Our case study is based on the Alfarrábio project, a cultural cooperative to maintain and support the publication of cultural resources on the Web, both by individuals and non-profit organizations. The cataloguing task of every relevant document (HTML pages are just specific instances of documents) was one of the main concerns of the project; it is supported by automatic tools. We build a semantic net of all related terms (according to predefined and user's defined relations) crossing all Alfarrábio resources: whole sites, HTML pages, images, travel maps, sound files, XML documents, relational data, etc. This is quite different from the approaches taken by the so-called portals, where information within different channels is not crossed, and resources (and whole sites) are only cataloged in broader terms. Due to the lack of human resources, we developed a set of automatic cataloging tools and dynamically generated browsing tools. The participation of each site creator in the cataloguing of his own information is supported and encouraged. In this article we present and explain the developed tools for information extraction, for cataloging maintenance, and for conceptual browsing.

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PT Museu da Pessoa — Arquitectura

• Year: 2000
• Booktitle: ABAD - Associação Bibliotecários e Arquivistas
• Author: J. João Almeida, J. Gustavo Rocha, P. Rangel Henriques, Sónia Moreira and Alberto Simões
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  É conhecido o extremo valor patrimonial e sociológico das Histórias de Vida. No entanto, apesar do encanto irresistível das histórias, trata-se de um património em rápido desaparecimento. O Museu da Pessoa é um arquivo fundamentalmente acessível pela Internet, que apresenta um conjunto de especificidades:

  arquivo electrónico; documentos multi-formato e contendo documentos; complexidade do ciclo de vida de aquisição das histórias; meta-informação, documentos, estruturas classificativas, postos de construção e consulta, tudo no mesmo suporte; trabalho cooperativo multi-instituição, internacional. Neste documento descreve-se o projecto e apresenta-se a arquitectura do Museu da Pessoa discutindo-se a problemática associada à sua concretização.

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PT Escola Online — Um Projecto Apresenta-se

• Author: Alberto Manuel Brandão Simões and Isabel Maria Brandão Simões
• Booktitle: Actas da II conferência internacional de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação na Educação
• Pages: 1195 - 1202
• Year: 2000
• Abstract: [ >> ][ << ]

  Neste documento pretendemos apresentar um projecto iniciado à cerca de um ano com o objectivo de construir uma base de dados documental de artigos escritos por alunos do segundo ciclo sobre as matérias lectivas. Apresentamos as finalidades com que foi construído, o que é actualmente e o que queremos que seja. Explicamos, também, que tecnologias suportam o projecto e quais as suas vantagens.

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